


Outrageous Fortune

by cygnes



Category: Swordspoint Series - Ellen Kushner
Genre: Gen, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-12-21
Updated: 2015-12-21
Packaged: 2018-05-08 02:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,683
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/5479301
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cygnes/pseuds/cygnes
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The one where Riverside is a summer stock theater, and a belligerent director and a well-known fight choreographer are obligated to share a room.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Outrageous Fortune

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Snow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Snow/gifts).



> An AU loosely inspired by my own time working in summer stock, though I worked on the technical side of things (in costuming), and have taken many artistic liberties with how it works. The title is a reference to line the same line in _Hamlet_ from which the title of the television show _Slings & Arrows_ (also about a summer stock theater) was taken. 
> 
> Warning for depression (including suicidal ideation) and alcohol abuse.

The season is already underway by the time Alec arrives. It’s hot—hotter than upstate New York usually is, even in the summer. He stands sweating at the bus stop for almost half an hour before a car pulls up. 

“Alec fucking Campion,” Michael says. “The prodigal son returns.”

“Grandson,” Alec says. He tosses his bag in the trunk with more force than necessary. “How is the old bat?”

“Looking good, actually. She’s got kind of a Helen Mirren–Meryl Streep thing going on.” Alec hasn’t seen Michael since they were both in high school. Less than a decade; long enough to make them strangers. “Didn’t you talk to her when you negotiated your contract?"

“Of course not. Haven’t you heard? She only has any interest in the theater’s _finances_. She has absolutely no stake in the artistic management.” Alec doesn’t try to keep the derision from his voice.

“Christ, you haven’t changed at all,” Michael says, startled into a laugh.

Alec has changed. It’s just that Riverside still brings out the worst in him.

The housing for directors and visiting artists, where Alec will be staying, is a damn sight better than the housing for the acting company and technical staff. Michael drives past one of those sad houses: respectable enough on the outside, hideously overcrowded and falling apart inside. He remembers that house through the haze of his first night of real drinking. Not a bad memory or a good memory, just a particular moment. Alec wants a drink now, but it’s barely three in the afternoon. He’ll wait until he’s unpacked, at least. Michael keeps driving and Alec thinks about the 1.75 liter bottle of Boodle’s gin in his suitcase. 

“I’m in rehearsals already,” Michael is saying. “ _Dirty Rotten Scoundrels_ , can you believe it?”

“Nothing could be more apt,” Alec says. Michael says something so blatantly ridiculous about his choreographer that it crosses back over into being boring. Alec ignores him. “I’ll be in rehearsals once your show goes up. Though I have to cast the fucker first, aside from the Equity people coming in.” He’s not interested in what Michael might have to say about it. Not really. Alec is thinking out loud—a habit born in bygone days of collaboration and fostered by the crushing loneliness of the past two and a half months.

“I can point out the ones with classical voice training,” Michael says. It’s a genuine offer. “You could sit in on a music rehearsal, if you want.” This is less a genuine offer and more just Michael still trying to be polite.

“Better to go in unbiased,” Alec says. He’ll do open auditions, watch them squirm a little. See who cracks. He knows he should thank Michael for the offer, however insincerely made. He doesn’t.

The house for visiting artists is a rental property, with a few shrubs out front and a lawn that looks cared-for. Upstairs, each bedroom has a card on the door. _GODWIN, ST. VIER, CAMPION, BLACK_. Only St. Vier and Campion are on the same door. Alec tears off the other name and closes the door behind him before Michael can say anything else. He’s tired from the bus ride but life has presented him with an opportunity to give someone hell. Alec never could resist that.

“Hello, Virginia Vandall speaking,” chirps the voice on the other end of the line.

“Virginia Vandall, why didn’t you tell me I had a roommate?” Alec says. “It seems like I’m the only one.” He hears the shuffle of papers on the other end of the line. 

“Mr. Campion,” she says at last. “I’m so sorry for the mix-up about getting someone to pick you up this afternoon.”

“Thanks, Virginia Vandall,” Alec says, because he likes the sound of the name and because he thinks it will get on her nerves. “But that isn’t why I called. There are a couple of open rooms here. Why am I sharing?”

“Well, I didn’t set up the room assignments,” Vandall says. “That would be Marie. We have several Equity actors coming in for the next show, so those empty rooms will fill up quickly.”

“I’m _directing_ the next show,” Alec says. “Can I talk to Marie?”

“She’s not in the office just now, but I’d be happy to introduce you to her at dinner tonight.” An artificial sweetness has crept into her voice. It’s a customer service trick that means Alec has crossed a line. There’s something satisfying in that. He’d rather know who his enemies are, even if that means making enemies of everyone he meets.

“Sounds like a plan, Virginia Vandall,” Alec says, and hangs up. He roots through his suitcase for the gin and ambles downstairs, loose-limbed. The bottle takes up more of the communal refrigerator’s freezer than is fair to the other residents. “There’s only one bed,” Alec says to no one. “Whoever St. Vier is, I’m going to kick his ass, because I’m not sleeping on the floor.”

He doesn’t unpack, but he doesn’t open the bottle before dinner, either. Small mercies.

___ 

Marie is matter-of-fact and Alec dislikes her less than he expects to. 

“There’s another mattress in the hall closet,” she explains, “and another bed frame in the basement. It was supposed to be brought up yesterday. I’ll talk to someone, get it done tomorrow.” Alec thinks about the bed already in the room. Old, maybe as old as the house, and probably hand-carved. St. Vier can have whatever IKEA piece of crap they’re keeping in the basement because that bed is _Alec’s_.

“Who’s St. Vier?” Alec says.

“Richard St. Vier?” Marie says. “You haven’t heard of him?”

And Alec thinks _shit_. He has heard of Richard St. Vier. He just didn’t make the connection to the best fight choreographer in the Northeast, because he didn’t consider the fact that St. Vier might be working at a summer stock theater barely known outside the county it’s in.

“He’s in and out,” Marie goes on. “Really, the room’s yours, but since room and board are in his contract, we have to have an open bed for him when he’s here. And you’re an unknown, so.” She shrugs. “You could try to argue your case with Ginnie, but I wouldn’t bet on it."

Alec has never been especially good at picking his battles, but he knows Riverside. This isn’t the one that will make or break the summer, and it’s a non-issue until St. Vier shows up. Alec uses the first few days to his advantage. There are production meetings, which don’t go terribly. He’s introduced to the scene shop and costume shop managers and forgets them immediately. Their respective designers will deal with them for him. He ignores the acting company. They’re not his problem until they’re onstage. (And he meets Michael’s choreographer, who really does have a prosthetic arm.)

It’s the board members who are of most interest to Alec even as he tries to avoid their visits. Diane keeps her distance—her reputation for disinterest depends on it, thank god—but Ferris always seems to be in the artistic director’s office. From what Alec can tell, the artistic director is a man who gets on well with most of the board but doesn’t capitulate to their every whim. Alec has no personal feelings about him, but he revels in the knowledge that his grandmother must hate him. He was the one who proposed _Wozzeck_ for the season. It’s almost certainly a bid for a regional award, because local audiences are hardly likely to go for it. A small town full of wealthy retirees isn’t going to love a musically weird, thematically dark opera. But Alec can see the logic there: get a good write-up for something uncharacteristic, draw in vacationing New Yorkers.

Alec doesn’t care about the logic as much as he cares about the art. Whether or not it does what it’s meant to, _Wozzeck_ is going to be damn good.

___ 

At the end of his first week, Alec meets Richard St. Vier, who explains that he’s got projects going on in New York along with some work for the Vermont Shakespeare Festival. They talk briefly about the murder scene in Alec’s show. It’s all very professional and Alec makes no effort to ingratiate himself with his roommate beyond that.

But:

“Why are you in my bed?” Richard says when he comes into their room that night.

“ _My_ bed,” Alec insists. “I was here first.”

“My contract started in May,” Richard says. “Those are my sheets.” Alec hadn’t given any thought to where the sheets had come from.

“Well,” Alec says after a moment’s consideration, “do you want to share?”

Richard smiles.

___ 

“His last girlfriend has a restraining order, you know,” Ginnie says rather nastily when Alec says the second bed can be moved back into the basement. He should be talking to Marie about this, he knows, but he’d rather annoy _Virginia Vandall_ about it. “He was here two years ago when the papers were served.”

“My last boyfriend is in prison,” Alec says loftily, “so we’ll get along just fine.” It’s a lie. His last boyfriend is in Boston, training to be a paralegal. They both got picked up for a bar fight once, but that was mostly Alec’s fault. 

The look on Ginnie’s face is worth it.

___ 

In the two days before _Scoundrels_ goes up (and _Wozzeck_ rehearsals consume Alec’s life), he spends a lot of time with Richard. He also spends a lot of time listening to other people talk about Richard, because news travels fast, and even the people who aren’t sure he’s sleeping with Richard know that they’re roommates.

Marie has known Richard the longest. She only started at Riverside a year before Richard, and they both kept coming back. (Like a couple of bad pennies, Marie says.) It’s Marie who tells Alec that Richard dropped out of high school and lived on the road for a while. It’s Marie who tells him that everything before that is a blank. Alec respects that. He’d wipe his origins from the record, if he could. At night, when they lie in bed together, Alec rests his head on Richard’s shoulder and imagines them as an old cathode ray TV tuned to an empty channel. Everything before now recedes into static and white noise. Alec may not be capable of love, but he’s capable of this.

Hugo and Ginnie have known Richard for nearly as long. Ginnie is at once vague and vicious in her insinuations. Alec reflects her meanness back at her. Hugo, on the other hand, respects Richard even as he dislikes him. Hugo is the technical director, and while his swagger may be fake, he doesn’t bullshit. It’s Hugo who tells Alec about who Richard learned from, how he built his reputation. It’s Hugo who tells him that Richard won’t choreograph fights for Renaissance fairs, that Richard has worked in film and only went back to live theater recently—

Hugo stops, running up against a story that isn’t his to tell. The same story Ginnie keeps trying to tell but doesn’t have the specifics for.

When Alec asks Richard about the Renaissance fair thing, he says, “There’s nothing wrong with it. I know some Broadway people work for Sterling Forest. It’s just not what I want to do.”

“Is _this_ what you want to do?” Alec says. He knows he’s being a little mean, but he doesn’t care. 

“It’s what I’m doing now,” Richard says, which isn’t an answer.

“What about film?” Alec says. 

“I met Quentin Tarantino once,” Richard says. It isn’t an answer, either, but Alec is distracted enough not to push for one.

“You didn’t.”

“I did. It was at a party with a lot of stunt actors. I said, ‘you probably get this a lot, but you look like Tarantino,’ and he said, ‘I do get that a lot, because I am Tarantino’.” Richard tells this story the same way he’d tell a story about getting a flat tire. There’s nothing grandiose about it. It happened, that’s all.

“What did you say?” Alec says, though he knows the best part of the story is over.

“I introduced myself and then we talked to other people,” Richard says. Then, more softly, “Do you always drink this much?” (The bottle in the freezer downstairs is more than two-thirds empty.)

“Not when I’m working,” Alec says.

___ 

Alec doesn’t drink when he’s working because work is its own kind of high and its own kind of self-destruction. It consumes him. He has the three-week run of Michael’s show to stage a whole damn opera, with everyone but the Equity artists dead on their feet from performing nightly. The rehearsal space is inadequately sized and acoustically dead. He doesn’t even want to _look_ at the designers for the first week. The only competent people in the whole company suddenly seem to be the stage managers and his music director. Rose Black has conducted for Lincoln Center and spent a season singing in the Met’s ensemble before that.

“So what are you doing _here_?” Alec asks her. They linger in the rehearsal space when the actors have been dismissed to dinner. Alec doesn’t plan on eating; Rose has to get ready for the orchestra rehearsal that will happen late at night, after the show lets out and the musicians are available. 

“Nostalgia,” Rose says. “I know it’s the same for Richard. Misplaced loyalty to the place we started out.” She looks at him, considering. “Is that why you’re here, too?”

“You’re too smart for your own good, Rose,” Alec says. “Keep that to yourself.”

Rose taps the side of her nose and winks. “Scout’s honor. Not that I was ever a scout, but, you know.” She doesn’t ask him any more personal questions. Alec returns the favor.

Week two is harder. Richard is away, in Vermont, at one of his other gigs. They’ve already staged the murder scene, so Alec doesn’t need him. But when _Scoundrels_ is going on and Alec is alone with his thoughts he keeps thinking about stealing Michael’s car and driving until he reaches the nearest of the Great Lakes and driving _in_. He thinks about Rose, too—about how he doesn’t always go for women but he might go for her, because they’d both enjoy it, and then when Richard found out, Alec could be sure of where they stand.

Alec thinks about Richard more than is really reasonable, when he has time to think about something other than the thousand million things wrong with _Wozzeck_.

Michael is still there, improbably, past his show’s opening. When Alec asks why, he says he wants to see Alec’s opera. Bullshit. So Alec asks again, and Michael says his next contract doesn’t start for a month and he might as well enjoy semi-rural living in the meanwhile. Michael’s room has already been vacated for someone who’ll be arriving for the next show. It’s not exactly rocket science to figure out where he’s staying now. Not after he’d put an arm around Diane Tremontaine’s waist during the champagne toast after the opening of _Dirty Rotten Scoundrels_. Alec talks to Michael less after that conversation. Just in case.

Not that he talks to anyone very much, apart from what’s necessary. He has made himself unpleasant company. So much so that when Richard comes back two days before Alec goes into tech, Alec can only find it in himself to be frustrated. Angry, even. 

“Why are you here?” Alec says. He has asked this question a hundred times, to everyone he meets at Riverside, and it hasn’t meant the same thing twice.

“I wanted to see things through,” Richard says.

Alec knows he could start an argument over it (or, failing that, a one-sided tirade) if he wanted to. Part of him always wants to. And he wants clarity in this—wants to pull the honest truth of the matter from Richard, willing or not.

He doesn’t.

Alec rests his head on Richard’s shoulder and searches for white noise, empty airwaves, to fill the vacuum. He is almost glad not to be at the bottom of a lake, polluting someone’s drinking water. It’s easier to find time to fight than it is to find time for _this_ , whatever it is.

___ 

On the first day of tech, one of the set pieces falls on an assistant stage manager. Alec doesn’t really like many people, not in a friendly way, and he knows he’s a nightmare to work with. But that ASM is part of his team. He is livid.

The artistic director isn’t in his office when Alec storms in. Ferris is.

“I fucking bet no one at Glimmerglass has to put up with this shit,” Alec says. Ferris looks at him coolly.

“That’s true,” he says. “Glimmerglass also wouldn’t have hesitated to break your contract when you got kicked out of grad school. Though I doubt they would have hired you in the first place. I wouldn’t have, if it had been my call.”

“This is never going to be your office,” Alec fires back. “Diane might have promised you it would be, if this year went badly enough, but you underestimated how hard people are willing to work.” He smiles sardonically, ready to twist the knife. “And she’s moved on to greener pastures. Or hadn’t you heard?”

Ferris doesn’t try to hit Alec because he’s not an idiot. Alec knows to expect some kind of retribution from the cold fury in his eyes, but he has bigger problems to deal with. Like finding the production manager and figuring out what to do about the set and stage management.

___ 

“I brought her flowers,” Richard tells him. “She’s not concussed, so she doesn’t have to stay in the hospital. She has the day off.”

“Nice of you,” Alec says.

“I said they were from you,” Richard says, which is honestly baffling. Alec files this away as another thing to deal with later because he has room in his head for nothing but _Wozzeck_ until it goes up. He doesn’t know what he means by _deal with it_. 

___

This show is not a disaster; the champagne toast following the opening performance is. Horn (who Alec knows mainly as the board member who occasionally stops by rehearsal to leer at the actors) calls Alec a cocksucker in front of the whole company, and then Richard breaks Horn’s nose. The situation has Ferris written all over it but, because it’s Ferris, Alec can’t prove anything. He’s thinking about following Richard’s example and trying to punch Ferris when Diane saunters over.

“Such a terrible mess,” she says. “Will you come for brunch tomorrow?” 

Alec knocks back the rest of his champagne. “I’d say no, but then you’d have me kidnapped,” Alec says. “What time?”

“I’ll have someone pick you up at ten,” Diane says, and heads back into the fray with her usual poise. Alec heads in the opposite direction—away, into the night.

Despite the theater’s name, it’s about a fifteen minute walk to the river. It’s not very deep. More a tributary than a river in its own right. He sits at a picnic table and watches the water. For a moment (or two or three) he might as well be fifteen again. He would come out here to be alone. Not that he had anything particular to escape: summers were better than the rest of the year, in some ways. Alec and his sister got two and a half months away from their parents, away from the city. It wasn’t as bad as it could have been. And Alec learned. He learned whatever people would teach him, and whatever they failed to hide from him.

He always ran himself ragged, made the staff and actors hate him and made his sister cry at least once. Riverside used to bring out the worst in him. It made him feel alive. But some nights he’d walk down to the river just to be quiet and not feel anything except that quiet. It’s easier now than it was then. Maybe that’s what adulthood is: higher stakes, more efficient methods of self-destruction, and a sense of having earned more frequent moments of respite.

Alec wakes up with aches all over his body and no memory of falling asleep at the picnic table. It’s near dawn. He starts the walk to his grandmother’s house (over the river and through the woods) knowing that she will be awake when he gets there but nowhere near ready to receive him. It’s the little things.

___ 

Alec is expected to leave after his show opens, even though no one new is going to be coming along for the last show to share the room with Richard.

“How did it go?” Richard says. Alec is re-packing his suitcase when he comes in.

“She told me some things you must already know—that Horn isn’t pressing charges and won’t be on the board next year. That most of this is Ferris’s fault and he _will_ be on the board next year but won’t be trying for artistic directorship. I got a croissant, though. The morning wasn’t a total waste,” Alec says.

“Good to hear,” Richard says. He sits next to Alec on the bed. “Where are you headed next?”

“I don’t know,” Alec says. “Where are you headed?”

“New York,” Richard says. “Marie needs a new roommate, and there’s always work there.” He takes Alec’s hand. He doesn’t ask, doesn’t offer. Not verbally.

“Most of my contacts are in Boston,” Alec says, “but fuck Boston.”

“Marie likes you,” Richard says. “Or she doesn’t dislike you, at least, and likes me enough to lie about it. They don’t need me for the last show. I’m driving down tomorrow.”

“I could stay another night,” Alec says. “If it’ll save me the bus fare.” He’s thinking about New York, and whether Richard would want to get a cat. Then Richard kisses him and Alec stops thinking for a little while.


End file.
